DO WE REALLY COUNT OUR BLESSINGS?

Friday at work, my feet were really hurting…burning…aching…and just plain miserable...

Because I can never REALLY get a proper fitting shoe, and because when I do find something that is close they are pretty expensive, I don’t buy them very often...

In fact, I try to make them last until I just HAVE to have new ones...



Well, Saturday was the day. Hubby and I went out shoe shopping. He needed steel toed work boots, and I needed a couple pair of good work shoes to replace my two misshapen and worn out pairs.

We shopped…we paid…we conquered!

And…I am looking forward to trying them out this week.

My point, however, is not new shoes.

Every once in a while it is good, I think, to have a reality check. Yes, my hurting feet were definitely real, but was there somebody worse off than me? Did I have blessings to count?

That very day I just happened to be working with a patient who, in two short months, had gone from being an apparently able-bodied woman to someone with organ failure and other medical maladies, which landed her in the ICU near death. She eventually got well enough to go to a nursing home. This woman is in her 30s.

Last week, she came back to the hospital to have her second amputation. The top half of both feet are now gone. Though she had a wonderful attitude, she was in great pain, her feet burned, and the medicine was barely able to help.

My great grandma used to have a sign hanging in her hallway. It always scared me as a child. Now, it came back to me as a haunting reality. It read something like this…



"I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet."



Each time that day, as internally I started to complain about my ill-adept shoes, I brought my thoughts back to the woman who had no feet.